Politicians in this state have a favorite phrase. You’ve heard it at ribbon cuttings, in stump speeches, in every carefully staged photo op outside a Main Street bakery: support local.
It’s not a bad message. In fact, it’s a good one — and in Kansas, it actually means something. People here pay attention to whether you walk the talk.
Which is exactly why it stings a little to follow the money.
When campaigns start cutting checks for advertising, a funny thing happens to all that “support local” rhetoric. It boards a plane. The digital buys go to national platforms. The television budgets flow to stations owned by Gray Media Group out of Atlanta or Nexstar Media Group out of Irving, Texas — publicly traded corporations whose shareholders have about as much connection to Salina or Dodge City as a Times Square billboard does.
That’s where Kansas campaign dollars go. Not to Kansas.
Now, nobody’s accusing these candidates of bad faith. WIBW and KSNT reach a lot of eyeballs. MSNBC and Fox move the needle. The logic of chasing scale is real, and campaigns are always going to follow efficiency. Understood.
But there’s a difference between understandable and defensible — and candidates who build entire platforms around investing in Kansas communities ought to at least feel the tension here.
Kansas has independent, locally rooted outlets doing serious work: the Iola Register, the Kansas Reflector, This Is Topeka, and others that are woven into the actual fabric of the communities these candidates want votes from. They’re not vanity projects. They’re local journalism — the kind that covers school board meetings and water district disputes and things that don’t make the cable news chyron.
When a campaign advertises with them, something different happens. The money stays in Kansas. The jobs it supports are Kansas jobs. And the message lands with an audience that already regards the outlet as part of their community — not as a feed algorithm serving up targeted content from a data center in Virginia.
That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.
The ask here isn’t radical. Nobody is saying abandon television or go dark on digital. The ask is proportion — a deliberate, meaningful slice of the media budget directed toward Kansas-based outlets. Five percent. Ten percent. Enough to mean something.
Campaigns spend enormous energy optimizing everything else: A/B testing subject lines, analyzing cost-per-click, obsessing over impression share. Surely there’s room in that framework to ask a single, simple question before the next ad buy goes out: Does this spending reflect what we’re telling voters we believe?
Because voters aren’t naive. They’ll sit through a candidate’s speech about Kansas workers and Kansas businesses and Kansas values — and then they’ll watch where that candidate actually puts their money. Those two things are supposed to match.
“Support local” is a fine slogan. But slogans are the cheapest thing in politics. What costs something is actually doing it — and in a state that takes self-reliance and community investment seriously, that distinction has a way of mattering at the ballot box.
This editorial board encourages campaigns at all levels to examine their advertising expenditures and consider the communities they’re asking to send them to office.
